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The Don Giovanni Moment: Essays on the Legacy of an Opera
Author(s): Lydia Goehr (Editor), Daniel Herwitz
- Publisher: Columbia University Press
- Publication Date: June 2, 2008
- Language: English
- Print length: 264 pages
- ISBN-10: 0231137559
- ISBN-13: 9780231137553
Book Description
Mozart’s Don Giovanni is an operatic masterpiece full of iconic and mythical tensions that still resonate today. The work redefines the terms of power, seduction, and morality, and the resulting conflict between the aesthetic and the ethical is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment and romanticism.
The Don Giovanni Moment is the first book to examine the aesthetic and moral legacy of Mozart’s opera in the literature, philosophy, and culture of the nineteenth century. The prominent scholars in this collection address the opera’s impact on the philosophical visions of Kierkegaard, Goethe, and Williams and its influence on the literary and dramatic works of Pushkin, Hoffmann, Mörike, Byron, Wagner, Strauss, and Shaw. Through a close and careful analysis of Don Giovanni‘s literary and philosophical reception and its many appropriations, rewritings, and retellings, these contributors treat the opera as a vantage point from which theory and philosophy can reconsider romanticism’s central themes.
As lively and passionate as the opera itself, these essays continue the spirited debate over the meaning and character of
Don Giovanni and its powerful legacy. Together they prove that Mozart’s brilliant artistic achievement is as potent and relevant today as when it was first performed two centuries ago.Editorial Reviews
Review
The Don Giovanni Moment is the book for readers who have had enough of the discussion of who Mozart really was, and who want to understand the music’s impact on the intellect and, more widely, its influence on Western culture. — Alex Ross ― New Yorker
[This] new volume enriches the flourishing field of opera studies both within and beyond German studies. — Kevin S. Amidon ―
German Studies ReviewOne marvels at how
Don Giovanni ranges over the thought and culture of the nineteenth century and its aftermath… [and] applauds the editors. — Edmund J. Goehring ― Current Musicologythis new collection is unusual and thought-provoking. ―
Eighteenth Century MusicAbout the Author
Lydia Goehr is professor of philosophy and aesthetics at Columbia University. She is the author of The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music; The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy, and Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory. Daniel Herwitz is the Mary Fair Croushore Professor of Humanities and director of the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Star as Icon: Celebrity in the Age of Mass Consumption, and his short stories have appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review.
